Ars Technica

A study released on Wednesday finds that a live-virus vaccine that limits shingles symptoms was associated with a drop in the risk for dementia when it was introduced. The work took advantage of the fact that the National Health Service Wales made the vaccine available with a very specific age limit, essentially creating two populations, vaccinated and unvaccinated, separated by a single date. And these populations showed a sharp divide in how often they were diagnosed with dementia, despite having little in the way of other differences in health issues or treatments.

This study didn't come out of nowhere. There have been a number of hints recently that members of the herpesvirus family that can infect nerve cells are associated with dementia. That group includes Varicella zoster, the virus that causes both chicken pox and—potentially many years after— shingles, an extremely painful rash. And over the past couple of years, observational studies have suggested that the vaccine against shingles may have a protective effect.

But it's extremely difficult to do a clinical trial given that the onset of dementia may happen decades after most people first receive the shingles vaccine. That's why the use of NHS Wales data was critical. When the first attenuated virus vaccine for shingles became available, it was offered to a subset of the Welsh population. Those who were born on or after September 2, 1933, were eligible to receive the vaccine. Anyone older than that was permanently ineligible.

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Among the changes mentioned in yesterday's Nintendo Switch 2 presentation was a note that the new console doesn't just support MicroSD Express cards for augmenting the device's 256GB of internal storage, but it requires MicroSD Express. Whatever plentiful, cheap microSD card you're using in your current Switch, including Sandisk's Nintendo-branded ones, can't migrate over to your Switch 2 alongside all your Switch 1 games.

Why is regular-old MicroSD no longer good enough? It all comes down to speed.

Most run-of-the-mill SD and microSD cards you can buy today are using some version of the Ultra High Speed (UHS) standard. Designed to augment the default speed (12.5MB/s) and high speed (25MB/s) from the earliest versions of the SD card standard, the three UHS versions enable data transfers of up to 624MB/s.

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Samsung has turned to Chinese technology groups to prop up its ailing semiconductor division, as it struggles to secure big US customers despite investing tens of billions of dollars in its American manufacturing facilities.

The South Korean electronics group revealed last month that the value of its exports to China jumped 54 percent between 2023 and 2024, as Chinese companies rush to secure stockpiles of advanced artificial intelligence chips in the face of increasingly restrictive US export controls.

In one previously unreported deal, Samsung last year sold more than three years’ supply of logic dies—a key component in manufacturing AI chips—to Kunlun, the semiconductor design subsidiary of Chinese tech group Baidu, according to people familiar with the matter.

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The Nintendo Switch 2 could be considered the most direct "sequel" to a Nintendo console that the company has ever made. The lineage is right there in the name, with Nintendo simply appending the number "2" onto the name of its incredibly successful previous console for the first time in its history.

Nintendo's previous consoles have all differed from their predecessors in novel ways that were reflected in somewhat new naming conventions. The Switch 2's name, on the other hand, suggests that it is content to primarily be "more Switch." And after spending the better part of the day playing around with the Switch 2 hardware and checking out some short game demos on Wednesday, I indeed came away with the impression that this console is "more Switch" in pretty much every way that matters, for better or worse.

We've deduced from previous trailers just how much bigger the Switch 2 would be than the original Switch. Even with that preparation, though, the expanded Switch 2 makes a very good first impression in person.

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Nintendo's Switch 2 presentation gave us pricing for the console ($449 to start) and Nintendo's product pages have given us pricing information for accessories ($80 for a Pro Controller, $90 for another pair of Joy-Cons, and $110 for a replacement dock, sheesh). But what Nintendo didn't mention during the presentation was game pricing, either for standalone Switch 2 titles or the Switch 2 Edition upgrades for existing Switch games.

Nintendo announced via its website after the presentation that Mario Kart World, the console's flagship launch title, will cost $50 when you buy a digital copy as part of a Switch 2 bundle. But the game will cost $80 when you buy it on its own, $30 more than the pack-in version and $20 more than the usual $60 price for first-party Switch games.

Pre-order listings at US retailers that have gone live since this morning also list several $80 games—we'll use Wal-Mart's as an example. The upgraded Switch 2 Editions for a trio of Switch games—2024's Super Mario Party Jamboree, 2023's The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, and 2022's Kirby and the Forgotten Land—are all going for $80, the same as Mario Kart World.

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Last week, Health Secretary and anti-vaccine advocate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced the Trump administration would hack off nearly a quarter of employees at the Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees critical agencies including the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the National Institutes of Health (NIH), and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS).

The downsizing includes pushing out about 10,000 full-time employees through early retirements, deferred resignations, and other efforts. Another 10,000 will be laid off in a brutal restructuring, bringing the total HHS workforce from 82,000 to 62,000.

"This will be a painful period," Kennedy said in a video announcement last week. Early yesterday morning, the pain began.

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Paramount+ has dropped a tantalizing one-minute teaser for the upcoming third season of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds., and it looks like the latest adventures of the starship Enterprise will bring romance, comedy, mystery, and even a bit of analog tech, not to mention a brand new villain.

(Some spoilers for S2 below)

We haven't seen much from the third season to date. There was an exclusive clip during San Diego Comic Con last summer—a callback to the S2 episode "Charades," in which a higher-dimensional race, the Kerkohvians, accidentally reconfigured Spock's half-human, half-Vulcan physiology to that of a full-blooded human, just before Spock was supposed to meet his Vulcan fiancee's parents. The S3 clip had the situation reversed: The human crew had to make themselves Vulcan to succeed on a new mission but weren't able to change back.

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Fruit flies (Drosophila melanogaster) are tremendously fond of fermented foodstuffs. Technically, it's the yeast they crave, produced by yummy rotting fruit, but they can consume quite a lot of ethanol as a result of that fruity diet. Yes, fruit flies have ultra-fast metabolisms, the better to burn off the booze, but they can still get falling-down drunk—so much so, that randy inebriated male fruit flies have been known to court other males by mistake and fail to mate successfully.

Then again, apparently adding alcohol to their food increases the production of sex pheromones in male fruit flies, according to a new paper published in the journal Science Advances. That, in turn, makes them more attractive to the females of the species.

"We show a direct and positive effect of alcohol consumption on the mating success of male flies," said co-author Ian Keesey of the University of Nebraska, Lincoln. "The effect is caused by the fact that alcohol, especially methanol, increases the production of sex pheromones. This in turn makes alcoholic males more attractive to females and ensures a higher mating success rate, whereas the success of drunken male humans with females is likely to be questionable."

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On the heels of releasing its most capable AI model yet, Google is making some changes to the Gemini team. A new report from Semafor reveals that longtime Googler Sissie Hsiao will step down from her role leading the Gemini team effective immediately. In her place, Google is appointing Josh Woodward, who currently leads Google Labs.

According to a memo from DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis, this change is designed to "sharpen our focus on the next evolution of the Gemini app." This new responsibility won't take Woodward away from his role at Google Labs—he will remain in charge of that division while leading the Gemini team.

Meanwhile, Hsiao says in a message to employees that she is happy with "Chapter 1" of the Bard story and is optimistic for Woodward's "Chapter 2." Hsiao won't be involved in Google's AI efforts for now—she's opted to take some time off before returning to Google in a new role.

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I don't think anybody outside Nintendo or FromSoftware was expecting a spiritual successor to Bloodborne to be one of the titles announced at the Nintendo Switch 2's launch today. Not just "playable" on the Switch 2, but exclusive to it. But there it was, The Duskbloods, debuting its dread horror action just a few minutes before the luminously pink and puffy Kirby Air Ride 2. 

The Switch 2's launch titles, and other announced games, are quite the rich stew. Here are some of the AAA ports, exclusives, and unexpectedly gruesome games arriving on the just-announced system.

We'll get to FromSoftware's surprising Switch 2 exclusive in a bit. Far less surprising is a new Mario Kart game, as Mario Kart 8 sold more than 67 million copies, covering more than 40 percent of all Switches sold. Mario Kart World goes big, with 24 simultaneous players, and the ability to explore off the course in a kind of open-world setting.

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Europol has shut down one of the largest dark web pedophile networks in the world, prompting dozens of arrests worldwide and threatening that more are to follow.

Launched in 2021, KidFlix allowed users to join for free to preview low-quality videos depicting child sex abuse materials (CSAM). To see higher-resolution videos, users had to earn credits by sending cryptocurrency payments, uploading CSAM, or "verifying video titles and descriptions and assigning categories to videos."

Europol seized the servers and found a total of 91,000 unique videos depicting child abuse, "many of which were previously unknown to law enforcement," the agency said in a press release.

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National Security Advisor Michael Waltz and a senior aide used personal Gmail accounts for government communications, according to a Washington Post report published yesterday.

Waltz has been at the center of controversy for weeks because he inadvertently invited The Atlantic Editor-in-Chief Jeffrey Goldberg to a Signal chat in which top Trump administration officials discussed a plan for bombing Houthi targets in Yemen. Yesterday's report of Gmail use and another recent report on additional Signal chats raise more questions about the security of sensitive government communications in the Trump administration.

A senior Waltz aide used Gmail "for highly technical conversations with colleagues at other government agencies involving sensitive military positions and powerful weapons systems relating to an ongoing conflict," The Washington Post wrote.

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On Tuesday, the Wikimedia Foundation announced that relentless AI scraping is putting strain on Wikipedia's servers. Automated bots seeking AI model training data for LLMs have been vacuuming up terabytes of data, growing the foundation's bandwidth used for downloading multimedia content by 50 percent since January 2024. It’s a scenario familiar across the free and open source software (FOSS) community, as we've previously detailed.

The Foundation hosts not only Wikipedia but also platforms like Wikimedia Commons, which offers 144 million media files under open licenses. For decades, this content has powered everything from search results to school projects. But since early 2024, AI companies have dramatically increased automated scraping through direct crawling, APIs, and bulk downloads to feed their hungry AI models. This exponential growth in non-human traffic has imposed steep technical and financial costs—often without the attribution that helps sustain Wikimedia’s volunteer ecosystem.

The impact isn’t theoretical. The foundation says that when former US President Jimmy Carter died in December 2024, his Wikipedia page predictably drew millions of views. But the real stress came when users simultaneously streamed a 1.5-hour video of a 1980 debate from Wikimedia Commons. The surge doubled Wikimedia’s normal network traffic, temporarily maxing out several of its Internet connections. Wikimedia engineers quickly rerouted traffic to reduce congestion, but the event revealed a deeper problem: The baseline bandwidth had already been consumed largely by bots scraping media at scale.

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A SpaceX and X engineer, Christopher Stanley—currently serving as a senior advisor in the Deputy Attorney General's office at the Department of Justice (DOJ)—was reportedly caught bragging about hacking and distributing pirated e-books, bootleg software, and game cheats.

The boasts appeared on archived versions of websites, of which several, once flagged, were quickly deleted, Reuters reported.

Stanley was assigned to the DOJ by Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). While Musk claims that DOGE operates transparently, not much is known about who the staffers are or what their government roles entail. It remains unclear what Stanley does at DOJ, but Reuters noted that the Deputy Attorney General’s office is in charge of investigations into various crimes, "including hacking and other malicious cyber activity." Declining to comment further, the DOJ did confirm that as a "special government employee," like Musk, Stanley does not draw a government salary.

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On Wednesday, a team of researchers from China used a paper published in Nature to describe a 32-bit RISC-V processor built using molybdenum disulfide instead of silicon as the semiconductor. For those not up on their chemistry, molybdenum disulfide is a bit like graphene: a single molecule of MoS2 is a sheet that is only a bit over a single atom thick, due to the angles between its chemical bonds. But unlike graphene, molybdenum disulfide is a semiconductor.

The material has been used in a variety of demonstration electronics, including flash storage and image sensors. But we've recently figured out how to generate wafer-scale sheets of MoS2 on a sapphire substrate, and the team took advantage of that to build the processor, which they call RV32-WUJI. It can only add single bits at a time and is limited to kilohertz clock speeds, but it is capable of executing the full RISC-V 32-bit instruction set thanks to nearly 6,000 individual transistors.

We've identified a wide range of what are termed 2D materials. These all form repeated chemical bonds in more or less a single plane. In the case of graphene, which consists only of carbon, the bonds are all in the same plane, meaning the molecule is as thick as a carbon atom. Molybdenum disulfide is slightly different, as the angle of the chemical bonds is out of plane, resulting in a zig-zag pattern. This means the sheet is slightly thicker than its component atoms.

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We've known for a few months now that the Nintendo Switch 2 will support backward compatibility for older Nintendo Switch games, and as of today's presentation, we also know that some Switch games will get special Switch 2 Editions that add new features and support higher resolutions and other features.

Nintendo's product pages for the Switch add more details, including the status of backward-compatibility testing for original Switch games and a small handful of first-party Switch games that will get "free updates" to enhance them for Switch 2.

First, some good news. There will be a second tier of updates for original Switch games that Nintendo says "may improve performance or add support for features such as GameShare in select games." These won't include the extra features or higher resolutions of Switch 2 Edition games, but they'll be available for free, and they ought to improve playability. Nintendo lists a dozen first-party Switch games that will benefit from free Switch 2 updates:

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Actor Val Kilmer—star of Top Gun, The Doors, and Batman Forever, among other roles—has died at the age of 65 of pneumonia, Deadline Hollywood reports.

Kilmer was diagnosed with throat cancer in 2015 and while chemotherapy and two tracheotomies helped him defeat it, the procedures destroyed his voice. He spoke in a rasp or used an electric voice box for the remainder of his life and largely left acting. (He made a brief cameo in 2022's Top Gun: Maverick, for which his voice was digitally altered.) The 2021 documentary Val, narrated by his son Jack Kilmer, followed his life and health struggles.

Kilmer had a reputation for being eccentric and difficult to work with, but he also had his champions, and his talent was undeniable. “While working with Val on Heat, I always marveled at the range, the brilliant variability within the powerful current of Val’s possessing and expressing character," Michael Mann, who directed the actor in 1995's Heat, told Deadline. "After so many years of Val battling disease and maintaining his spirit, this is tremendously sad news.”

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In early 2024, the bird influenza that had been spreading across the globe for nearly three decades did something wholly unexpected: It showed up in dairy cows in the Texas Panhandle.

A dangerous bird flu, in other words, was suddenly circulating in mammals—mammals with which people have ongoing, extensive contact. “Holy cow,” says Thomas Friedrich, a virologist at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. “This is how pandemics start.”

This bird flu, which scientists call highly pathogenic avian influenza, or H5N1, is already at panzootic—animal pandemic—status, killing birds in every continent except for Australia. Around the world, it has also affected diverse mammals including cats, goats, mink, tigers, seals, and dolphins. Thus far, the United States is the only nation with H5N1 in cows; it’s shown up in dairies in at least 17 states.

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Tesla posted its production and sales numbers for the first quarter of 2025 this morning, and they continue the bad news streak for the electric automaker. Tesla produced 362,615 vehicles in total between January and the end of March, a 16.3 percent decrease from the same period in 2024.

The drop in sales was a little less bad; unlike this time last year, Tesla was able to more closely match production with demand. As a result, the company delivered 336,681 EVs in Q1, a drop of 12.9 percent compared to Q1 2024.

The Models 3 and Y make up the vast majority of Tesla's business—it built 345,454 of them in Q1 2025, a 16.2 percent reduction compared to the same period last year. Despite a recent refresh for the Model Y, which comprised the majority of these two EVs, sales declined by 12.4 percent year over year, with just 323,800 being sold, compared to 369,783 deliveries for Q1 2024.

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I've been complaining about tech a lot recently, and I don't apologize for it. Complaining feels great. That feeling of beleaguered, I-against-the-world self-righteousness? Highly underrated.

But a little righteous complaint goes a long, long, loooong way. (Just ask my wife.) Too much can be corrosive, it can make you insufferable to others, and it can leave you jaded, as many people, myself included, have become about technology.

I had three recent experiences, however, that were each quite small in their way but which reminded me that not everything in the tech world has fallen victim to the forces of "enshittification." Once in a while, technology still feels easy and—dare I co-opt the world from Apple's marketing department?—even magical.

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